Hundreds in Army Social Science Unqualified, Former Boss Says [Updated]

Nearly five years after the Army began a controversial program to embed social scientists in combat units, the former director and chief bureaucratic force behind the program says that over a third of those researchers never should have been part of the program in the first place.

“Thirty to 40 percent of the people were not qualified,” says Steve Fondacaro, the retired Army colonel who ran the Human Terrain System from its 2006 birth until he was ousted in June. He’s speaking out in a rare post-firing interview because the contract to supply HTS with social-science experts is up for grabs — and the company that handled the job for the last five years hobbled the program, he says.

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Commands disagrees, and the company, BAE Systems, didn’t answer Danger Room’s questions. But with the program expanding, the ability of the next HTS contractor to provide local commanders with quality cultural advisers could make an enormous difference in the American combat efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Simply put, if the United States can’t understand the populations it deals with in complex, irregular wars like Afghanistan — their traditions, their social structures, their power dynamics — then American counterinsurgency efforts are in deep trouble.

“Dealing with BAE was extremely difficult,” Fondacaro tells Danger Room. The contractor found it staggeringly difficult to provide “what I needed in terms of people and functions” for the program. That is, social scientists who both were physically and intellectually fit to operate in austere conditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who were “flexible enough to work with a military organization.”

But BAE struck Fondacaro as “unwilling to do the hard work in terms of screening and testing, finding the people capable of working with the energy, the intellectual capacity and the competence for this exercise we were about to embark on.” In one case, BAE provided HTS with an octogenarian Iraqi-American for a job translating in Iraq.

In another case, it gave HTS an applicant with a warrant out for her arrest for vehicular manslaughter — “which could have been easily ascertained through a cursory background investigation,” says Montgomery McFate, until recently the program’s top social scientist. “While BAE sent us some amazing people, they also sent us some people who were clearly not deployable,” she adds.

“Some of the people they were sending me were not up to par, and I had to let them go from the program,” Fondacaro says. “We had some people who did not work out downrange. It was just a very uncooperative arrangement.”

While Fondacaro has been portrayed in some corners of the blogosphere as a huckster looking to get rich off of a program that grew to a $100 million-plus annual budget, he doesn’t express a particularly rosy view of defense contractors: “They like to go out and get the lowest common denominator of people and charge the government an exorbitant price for them. I don’t blame them for that, it’s just business.” But the Army, in Fondacaro’s view, failed to keep BAE in check.

When HTS began, it was seen as a way for the military to overcome its near-crippling ignorance about the cultural, political and social landscapes of the war zones it was fighting in. The idea behind HTS was to give local infantry commanders their own set of cultural advisers. They’d poll the locals, map out tribal alliances, and sort out the real power brokers from the blowhards.

With that information in hand, the HTS leaders promised, American forces could win battles while firing a fraction of the bullets they did before. “In a counterinsurgency, your level of success is inversely proportional to the amount of lethal force that you expend,” McFate said in 2008.

The first test of the HTS went almost too well to be believed, with a local commander in Afghanistan crediting his Human Terrain Team with an astonishing 60 to 70 percent drop in the number of bombs-and-bullets strikes he had to make. The program grew exponentially, to 27 teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. But no commander ever made a similar boast about HTS’ influence. And complaints about the program’s recruits metastasized, making the program look like an unworthy enterprise.

BAE referred questions to the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, or TRADOC. “We’re committed to supporting the Army and ensuring success for the HTS program,” says Stephanie Moncada, a BAE spokeswoman, in a brief comment. “We believe in the program’s mission, and we believe we’ve contributed positively to its success.”

Maxie McFarland, who oversees Human Terrain for TRADOC — and who praised Fondacaro as “a tremendous guy” — concedes that the contract requirements could have been tighter, but says that the Human Terrain System was trying to do something unprecedented. “When you’re starting something new and uncertain,” he says, “you try to make performance work statements be broad, to give yourself flexibility to change and adjust.”

TRADOC is set to release a new solicitation for a contractor to recruit and train HTS staffers. (A version for small businesses was released in September.) BAE wants to retain the contract; McFarland hopes to award it in the new year. Among the requirements he wants to rein in: the four-month training period for HTS social scientists, which he wants to shrink.

But McFarland says Fondacaro is wrong to call a substantial chunk of HTS staff unfit for Iraq or Afghanistan. Of the 650 people to come through the program since its 2006 inception, “92 percent of them have completed their tour.” The pre-deployment training program’s “washout rate” has fallen from 22 percent to 5 percent, McFarland says, and the reasons for washing out typically concern physical fitness or minor security-clearance issues.

When talking to brigade commanders returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, McFarland says he typically hears, “If nothing else continues with what we’ve done in adjusting our force structure [during] eight years of war, the Human Terrain Systems should continue.”

In June 2010, with the congressionally directed investigation underway into HTS’ allegedly lax oversight of its field teams, Fondacaro learned his services were no longer welcome. He considers himself thrown under the bus: “What do you do” when under investigation, Fondacaro says. “Within the government, you usually start your own investigation, to get your excuses all set together, and you ID something to blame, or someone.”

That’s a charge McFarland denies. “I asked Steve for his resignation,” he says, because he was “not the right guy to institutionalize” the program, having pushed the Army bureaucracy hard to get it to accept the concept of anthropologists and sociologists wearing body armor and working with combat brigades.

“At some point, for any program to endure, it has to become part of the system,” McFarland says. It “just so happens” that Fondacaro’s ouster coincides with the still-unreleased inquiry. He wanted McFate to stay, but she resigned in the summer, having recently had a baby and looking for a change, particularly now that her friend Fondacaro was gone. McFate recently started a job at the Naval War College in Newport.

Fondacaro doesn’t know what his next move is yet. He just hopes that the Human Terrain System continues — with stronger oversight, at institutional levels higher than TRADOC. “I’ll do anything to help the program, aid the program, and [raise] as much awareness, accurate awareness, about what this program is about and what it still needs to achieve,” he says. “If it disappears because it’s too laden with political problems and this crap, that will be a disaster.”

Update, 1:15 p.m.: We’ve received some fair, valid criticism of this post that’s worth noting. First, to elaborate on a point McFarland makes in the piece, the requirements given to BAE at the beginning of HTS were kept broad, as there had never been an effort to incorporate social scientists into Army units before. And Fondacaro himself, as he admits freely, made a big bureaucratic push to stand the program up rapidly and expand it — a point I could have done a better job explaining — which naturally filters down to BAE in its efforts to recruit people for HTS. Finally, not every personnel hiccup HTS encountered is attributable to BAE, and was included in this post merely to recount some of the hardships that the program has endured in its rocky first half-decade.